Ex-Army Official Accused Of Spying / Long espionage career for Soviet KGB alleged

Vernon Loeb, Washington Post

Published
4:00 am PDT, Thursday, June 15, 2000

A retired U.S. Army intelligence official was arrested in Florida yesterday and charged with passing secret documents from a military base in Germany to the Soviet KGB, and later to Russia's foreign espionage service, during a 26-year spy career for which the former Soviet Union awarded him the Order of the Red Banner for bravery.

George Trofimoff, 73, who served as chief of a U.S. Army unit responsible for interviewing Warsaw Pact defectors from 1969 to 1995, was arrested at a hotel in Tampa, Fla., after allegedly accepting a payment from an FBI agent posing as a Russian intelligence agent. A U.S. magistrate ordered Trofimoff held without bail on a single count of espionage, which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison.

A naturalized U.S. citizen born in Germany to Russian emigrants, Trofimoff enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1948 and rose to the rank of colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve before retiring in 1987. Law enforcement officials described him as "the highest-ranking U.S. military officer ever charged with espionage."

According to a federal grand jury indictment unsealed after the arrest, Trofimoff was recruited as a KGB agent by Igor Vladimirovich Susemihl, a childhood friend in Germany who became a priest in the Russian Orthodox Church. The recruitment allegedly took place in 1969, shortly after Trofimoff was named chief of the U.S. Army contingent at the Joint Interrogation Center in Nuremberg, Germany, where American, German, British and French intelligence officers debriefed defectors from the Soviet bloc.

As Trofimoff gained wide access to intelligence documents with a top secret clearance and rose through the ranks of the Army Reserve, Susemihl rose through the Russian Orthodox Church to become an archbishop in Vienna and, ultimately, the Metropolitan of Austria. Susemihl died last year.

The indictment states that the KGB routinely "exploited the Russian Orthodox Church and its officials, including clergy" in intelligence operations.

Trofimoff and Susemihl were arrested in 1994 by German authorities on suspicion of espionage but were released because of Germany's five-year statute of limitations on espionage, U.S. officials said. The United States has no statute of limitations on espionage.

In announcing Trofimoff's arrest, federal officials did not make clear how they proceeded against Trofimoff following his arrest by the Germans, although it appears that an intelligence investigation and undercover operation ensued.

Federal officials also declined to comment on how much damage to national security may have resulted from Trofimoff's alleged spying. One senior U.S. official in Washington said major intelligence losses are not believed to have occurred.

Trofimoff retired from his Army civilian job in 1995 after 35 years. He has been living on Patriot Drive in a gated community in Melbourne, Fla., and works as a part-time bagger at a supermarket.